The biology of mood and anxiety disorders

We are witnessing a dramatic shift in the foundations of mental health and psychiatry, where research into the biological underpinnings of psychopathology is becoming increasingly important. This article collection aims to focus on all areas relevant to the mood and anxiety disorders at the level of their underlying mechanisms, including but not limited to: pathophysiology, predictive risk markers, treatment predictors, individual differences and developmental trajectories of mood and anxiety disorders. We welcome further research submissions on these topics. If you would like to submit your manuscript for consideration in the series, please contact journals@biomedcentral.com.

Coordination of activity between the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is important for fear-extinction learning. Aberrant recruitment of this circuitry is associated with anxiety disorders. ...

Childhood maltreatment is considered an important risk factor for the development of major depression. Research indicates an association between childhood adversity and altered emotion processing. Depression i...

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is accompanied by disturbed sleep and an impaired ability to learn and remember extinction of conditioned fear. Following a traumatic event, the full spectrum of PTSD symp...

Previous research reported that individual differences in the stress response were moderated by an interaction between individuals’ life stress experience and the serotonin transporter-linked polymorphic regio...

Proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy provides a non-invasive technology to study brain metabolite levels in vivo, which can be used to measure biochemical compounds or metabolite concentrations in circumscribed...

There is growing interest in the use of neuroimaging for the direct treatment of mental illness. Here, we present a new framework for such treatment, neurocognitive therapeutics. What distinguishes neurocognit...

Longitudinal neuroimaging studies of major depressive disorder (MDD) have most commonly assessed the effects of antidepressants from the serotonin reuptake inhibitor class and usually reporting a single measur...

50% to 60% of the people who have recovered from the first episode of depression experience a relapse. The immune system of the people suffering from depression is in a permanent state of pathological pro-infl...

Antepartum depression is one of the leading causes of maternal morbidity and mortality in the prenatal period. There is accumulating evidence for the role of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) in the pat...

Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is a member of the neurotrophin family of growth factors. Previous studies have demonstrated lower serum BDNF levels in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) an...

Subsyndromal depression (SSD) is considered as a predictor for future depressive disorders, however whether white matter abnormalities are involved in the high-susceptibility of women to depressive disorders d...

In view of previous conflicting findings, this meta-analysis was performed to comprehensively determine the overall strength of associations between brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) genetic polymorphis...

Postnatal depression (PND) is an important health problem of global relevance for maternal health and impacts on the health and wellbeing of the child over the life-course. Although recent multinational data i...

Childhood onset of anxiety disorders is associated with greater functional impairment and burden across the lifespan. Recent work suggests that generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is characterized by dysfunctio...

Aberrant amygdala-prefrontal interactions at rest and during emotion processing are implicated in the pathophysiology of generalized social anxiety disorder (gSAD), a common disorder characterized by fears of ...

Statin medications, used to prevent heart disease by reducing cholesterol, also reduce inflammation and protect against oxidative damage. As inflammation and oxidative stress occur in depression, there is inte...

Depression is the most common co-morbidity for people with Multiple Sclerosis (MS); irrespective of disease severity, depression has the greatest impact on quality of life. An emerging paradigm in the treatmen...

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a common mental illness with high lifetime prevalence close to 20%. Positron emission tomography (PET) studies have reported decreased prefrontal, insular and limbic cerebral...

The experience of early life stress is a consistently identified risk factor for the development of mood and anxiety disorders. Preclinical research employing animal models of early life stress has made inroad...

It has long been suggested that feedback signals from facial muscles influence emotional experience. The recent surge in use of botulinum toxin (BTX) to induce temporary muscle paralysis offers a unique opport...

In this article, I argue for a reconceptualization of major depressive disorder (major depression) as an infectious disease. I suggest that major depression may result from a parasitic, bacterial, or viral inf...

Prior studies suggest that hyperactive insula responding to unpredictable aversiveness is a core feature of anxiety disorders. However, no study to date has investigated the neural correlates of unpredictable ...

When depressed patients are in remission, the clinical characteristics indicate that they are able to participate in social activities more regularly, and their impairment in daily functioning is improved. The...

The prevalence of mental strain and stress has increased in modern societies, resulting in increased public health problems. Stress can be measured either by biomarkers or by self-reports. A new biomarker that...

Neuroticism is frequently discussed as a risk factor for psychopathology. According to the maturity principle, neuroticism decreases over the course of life, but not uniformly across individuals. However, the ...

Increased cortisol levels and genetic polymorphisms have been related to both major depressive disorder and antidepressant treatment outcome. The aim of this study is to evaluate the relationship between circa...

Leptin and ghrelin have been implicated in the pathogenesis of major depression. However, evidence is lacking among apparently healthy people. This study examined the relationship of these appetite hormones to...

Social anxiety has been associated with potentiated negative affect and, more recently, with diminished positive affect. It is unclear how these alterations in negative and positive affect are represented neur...

Traumatic stress leads to functional reorganization in the brain and may trigger an alarm response. However, when the traumatic event produces severe helplessness, the predominant peri-traumatic response may i...

Telomere shortening is a normal age-related process. However, premature shortening of telomeres in leukocytes – as has been reported in depression – may increase the risk for age-related diseases. While previo...

Studies suggest that poor physical health might be associated with increased depression and anxiety recurrence. The objectives of this study were to determine whether specific chronic diseases and pain charact...

Major depression is associated with higher plasma levels of positive acute-phase proteins, as well as with lower plasma levels of negative acute-phase proteins. The aim of this study is to examine the levels o...

Previous functional imaging studies using symptom provocation in patients with social anxiety disorder (SAD) reported inconsistent findings, which might be at least partially related to different time-dependen...

Amino acid neurotransmitters and nitric oxide (NO) are involved in the pathogenesis of major depressive disorder (MDD). Here we want to establish whether changes in their plasma levels may serve as biomarker f...

Studies in adults with major depressive disorder (MDD) have implicated dysregulation of frontal-limbic circuits in the symptomology of this disorder. We hypothesized that the middle frontal gyrus (MFG; a core ...

The neuroimaging literature of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) has grown substantially over the last several decades, facilitating great advances in the identification of specific brain regions, neurotransmitt...

Animal studies have suggested that the hippocampus may play an important role in anxiety as part of the Behavioural Inhibition System (BIS), which mediates reactivity to threat and punishment and can predict a...

Previous neuroimaging studies have suggested an abnormal neural circuitry of emotion regulation including the amygdala and prefrontal cortex in both adult and adolescent generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) pati...

Recent studies examining the interaction between the 5-HTTLPR locus in the serotonin transporter gene and life stress in predicting depression have yielded equivocal results, leading some researchers to questi...

Abnormal decision-making processes have been observed in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD). However, it is unresolved whether MDD patients show abnormalities in decision making in a social interact...

Corticotropin-releasing factor type 2 receptors (CRFR2) are suggested to facilitate successful recovery from stress to maintain mental health. They are abundant in the midbrain raphe nuclei, where they regulat...

Changes in glucocorticoid receptors (GRs) have been implicated in the pathogenesis of stress related psychiatric disorders such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Abnormal adaptation of t...

Early adverse experiences, especially those involving disruption of the mother-infant relationship, are detrimental for proper socioemotional development in primates. Humans with histories of childhood maltrea...

Although interpretation biases are well documented among youth with anxiety disorders, understanding of their neural correlates is limited. In particular, there has been little study of how anxious youth neuro...